Dusty Takes Over the Internet!

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Targeted Marketing

Going through my local grocery store checkout line. It’s a good store: Sprouts is the name of the chain; local and organic food are the specialties (in theory — I am suspicious of their prices, which seem lower than one would expect from a sort of organic food market. But I know that the brands they carry are good brands.), the location is very convenient for us, directly between work and home; the staff are polite and friendly and efficient. Only very rare problems with things being out of stock, and their produce is generally top-notch.

And so, it seems, is their demographic-specific marketing. Because while they clearly cater to the new age/hippie/free spirit subset of their larger mainly liberal consumer base, they are in Arizona, after all, which is a damned conservative place. So as we were going through the line, on one side — the left side — was this adult coloring book:

“Activates the creative process of your imagination.”

And on the other side — the right side — was this one:

Now I just need to find the aisle that has the atheist/Cthulhu coloring books. “Coloring Cthulhu activates the healing powers of your madness!”

I would have thought conservative Arizona would frown on the crystal stuff, too, but I guess there are enough hippies shopping at Sprouts in Tucson. My wife noticed that both books had the same number of pages for coloring — and both described them as “ready for framing.” Seriously? Who would frame their coloring book pages?